Ruby - Part 2

I haven't dropped Ruby and have been playing with it since my last post. I'm not enthused, but neither am ready to give up. My problems might simply be learning pains of a new language, environment and paradigm or Ruby may simply not be the best tool for this particular project.



I've run into two problems so far:

1. Background processing: on top of me going to the page with our production server's status (this page is being generated by RoR), I would also like to put in place a few monitors. These monitors should run in the background and fire notifications when server stats get out of whack (e.g. when tomcat's number of current connections approaches the peak). There doesn't seem to be a unified way of doing this with RoR. I've seen solutions using half-assed hacks that look like Ruby ports of cron. But there is nothing that looks finished, polished, and usable.


2. Preference: I want to be able to persist some runtime parameters between application's runs. My options are: a database or the file system. Neither looks appealing. Dragging the RDBMS baggage around just so that I could save a handful of parameters seems excessive. On the other hand, I also hate when web apps mock with the file system because setting up and maintaining such an app is a hassle (setting up directory permissions, etc.). What I'd like a simple Preferences API similar to what Java has.

Trying Ruby

I want to create a web page for monitoring the health of our production server. The page would gather data from different places and display them in a dashboard kinda format. I didn't really want to use Java for this and instead decided to give Ruby on Rails a try.

Getting Ruby On Rails running on Windows in a Microsoft shop isn't trivial. Ruby (RubyGems) is really not designed for a Windows based corporate environment. I immediately ran into the firewall problem: we are running a MS firewall that uses NTLM authentication and Ruby doesn't support that out of the box.

I spent a few hours browsing around, reading blogs and articles, trying various things. Finally ran across a post pointing to a gem that interfaces with the native NTLM library: rubysspi-1.0.4-i386-mswin32.gem. After mocking about with it for a little while and finally RTFMing, I managed to get it to work and got RoR downloaded and installed.